One of my goals since I was young was to be a published fiction writer, yet I don't write near as often as I should. I always have so many ideas yet I always seem to find a way to avoid putting them down on paper. It seems that I have more excuses than ideas though, which obviously isn't a positive thing. I've finished a short novella of about 20,000 words but really never get around to editing it, another excuse I guess. What I wondering is how much can you love something if you can't find the push to do it? There is desire, no doubt about that, but I always find myself doing something else. My current kick, which is language learning, is a good example. I enjoy doing it but I find myself reading and watching podcasts about language learning more than actually doing it. I find myself reading about writing more than actually writing. I'm going to have to find something inside me that makes me focus and re-enforces the discipline I know is in there somewhere. I'm certainly the kind of person who needs to work and who isn't lazy at all, yet I find myself doing nothing, when there's nothing to do. The ideas the pump through my brain aren't the kind of ideas that would get me rich. I'm not interested in writing Stephen King or John Grisham type novels. It's more the Ayn Rands, the Albert Camuses, the CS Lewises, the Sartes, and the Kafkas that I feel that I can write and would enjoy writing. I'm interested in a slew genres, everything from the fantastic, to a more Murakami kind of magic realism. Apart from the fantastic I like pure realism, regular people in a non-magic world dealing with deep philosophical issues and sort of poking at the ‘Human Condition'. The latter is what my novella is about.
Another problem is that after I write something, I'm ready to throw it away. I see everything wrong with it and feel it's not good enough. I'm almost ready to just throw away what I wrote and write something else and pretend I haven't finished any kind of novel. The shortness of my first work also works against its favor because no one really wants to represent or publish a small novella. I figure the best advice I can give myself is to keep on plugging away and keep writing, I figure even if I could see the future and know that I'll never be published I would still write, albeit on the lazy schedule I'm on now. My next idea involves something fantasy oriented even though it's not my favorite genre to read, but I definitely excited about the idea, who know for how long though. Thanks for listening.
